A Caseworker's Tale
by SubwayWolf
Summary: Tracy hates his job as a caseworker: it's repetitive, boring, and he can't stand it anymore. Until one day, he's assigned Derek Thompson, and Tracy reluctantly accepts the hopeless case. ...Should be a few chapters long.


**Some inane, arbitrary story I wrote up; a fic for the film 'Tooth Fairy'. Enjoy!  
><strong>

* * *

><p>Work.<p>

That's all Tracy could do: work. It was his job, after all, and it required a lot of it. Being a caseworker was tough business because of its severe importance (or so he was told – he had never found the reason behind his work). Therefore every envelope, every address, every file, report, and diagram - it had to be perfect. And maybe that was what annoyed him the most.

Saying he was happy with his job wasn't entirely true. Even if he had been dealt the shorter straw, he fantasized often about having wings and being an actual tooth fairy. His negativity always brought him back down to the ground, literally, after only a short while of imagination. He couldn't mess about for long, after all: he had a job to do.

The so-called "significance" of his job kept him somewhat sane. He milked the thought that the winged fairies would be lost without him, because it made him think he was needed. It dawned upon him every so often that he really wasn't as needed as he thought. Of course the tooth fairies didn't need caseworkers! Management had been considering dropping caseworkers all together for months now! Tracy cringed at the thought of not having a job, because being a caseworker was really all he knew how to do. He couldn't play sports or do science; all he could do was file papers and put stuff in cabinets. Realizations like those were Tracy's lowest points.

He was fed up enough that he sometimes considered asking Lily to make him forget everything via amnesia dust and make him live a normal, human life. He never got up the nerve to ask about it, however. He was having enough troubles as a fairy, and by the looks of how some humans got on with their lives, Tracy knew he wouldn't be better off. As a fairy he didn't have a girlfriend, didn't have many friends, and didn't even have a house outside of what his work provided him. Being human wouldn't change that. It would actually make it worse – he'd be homeless.

So even as all of this anger and depression swirled through Tracy's head he still blindly put the papers in their files and placed them accordingly into their cabinets. Just like he had been doing for every day of his life: wearing the same blue suit, opening the same creaking file drawers, getting the same burning paper cuts.

He gritted his teeth as he watched his hands sort through the documents and their manila folders. He didn't even have to think about what he was doing anymore. He just watched himself as he flicked through the papers dumbly without thinking. It made him upset, how much of a robot he'd become. He imagined for a moment that he turned into a machine that processed files, but soon that vision went away when Tracy knew he wasn't a machine; he was just a wingless fairy with a worthless job and a woeful life. And he hated it.

So he stopped. He put his work down on the desk and sat still. He looked around his office as if there were somebody there but of course there wasn't. So Tracy buried his face in his arms and just laid there on his desk, thinking about everything at once.

He thought to himself, "This is mental," until he realized he was saying it out loud. The words were muffled by his arms covering his mouth but they were still spoken, and they were very true. He could speak about his job like that because why would there ever be someone outside his door who would hear it and be upset? The only people who ever came into his office were Ricky and Karl, two winged fairies who passed by his office every day they weren't busy, to shout insults at Tracy if his door was opened. That wasn't the entirely case either, because even if his door were closed they'd open it anyway to make fun of him.

Trying not to think about them, Tracy buried his face deeper into his folded arms and let out a small groan from deep inside his throat. His glasses were being pushed up his face but he didn't care. And that was his conclusion, too – he didn't care. Not about his job, not about why he was needed, not about the stupid tooth fairies who couldn't-

Suddenly there was a knock on the door. It startled Tracy but he didn't move from his position. He figured if he didn't answer, the nuisance would go away. After all, the people behind the door were probably Ricky and Karl again, and he didn't want to have to deal with them so why bother?

But the knocking was incessant. It was disrupting Tracy's thinking process so he figured he would just answer the door, get whatever was behind it over with, and continue on with his sulking and negativity. He sat up in his chair, messed about with some files to make it appear like he was doing work, and spoke a small, "Come in."

It jolted Tracy's heart when he saw, not the bullies Ricky and Karl, but instead Lily walk through his door. Tracy's eyes widened and he sat up straighter than usual in his chair. She never came into his office, not for anything! Tracy worried that he had been caught whinging on the job and was in trouble for it, but Lily didn't seem upset and that confused Tracy further.

"Tracy, hello," she said. She had a mousy voice that Tracy didn't really like. "How have you been?"

Tracy hated being asked that because if he answered it truthfully it would be awkward. He didn't like to lie, so he hated being asked how he was doing because the answer wasn't going to be true. "Good," he said. There was no point in elaborating so he didn't bother.

"I'd like you to watch this," she said. Tracy didn't like that either: her order which told him to watch whatever she was going to show was formed in a statement suggesting something that she wanted, something that she would like to see happen for her own personal gain. And that made Tracy a bit more agitated, because he didn't like being told what to do or how to do it, he wanted to play by his own rules and get things done his way. And the form of command Lily used shouldn't have ticked Tracy off, but it did and he was getting more and more annoyed by the second.

Lily used her All-Purpose Magic Generator to turn on the telly that was in the corner of Tracy's office. "This is Derek Thompson," she said as a dark-skinned, muscular man squabbled with a woman on-screen. Tracy watched with disgust as he pieced together the unfolding story about this Derek character lying to his girlfriend's daughter by telling her there was no such thing as a tooth fairy.

Tracy had seen this before, and it made him fume. He was already in a horrible mood and seeing a clueless man lying to a child only made it worse. It felt good to direct the anger towards someone other than himself, Tracy thought, nodding a little to himself, squinting his eyes.

"He's going to serve time as a tooth fairy," Lily explained. Tracy tilted his head a little as he wondered to himself why she was telling him this. She answered his question, "And I want you to be his caseworker."

Tracy's eyes widened as he stared at Lily, bewildered. Not only didn't he feel that he was qualified to be assigned to such a hopeless case, but he didn't like Derek Thompson already and Tracy hadn't even met him yet.

But Tracy figured it would be good for him, like a stress-reliever almost. After all, it would mean he had to file papers less often because he had to babysit Mr. Thompson instead. Tracy supposed he didn't have a choice anyway, but was still proud of himself that he had dug up at least one reason to be excited for something that probably wasn't going to go very well.

"Yes, of course," Tracy nodded, "I will."

"Good," Lily smiled. "He's arriving at 11:00. Stay up late tonight, Tracy."

"Yes, ma-am," he said. And as she left his office, Tracy rolled his eyes. He didn't want to stay up that late. He had woken up early this morning to get work done, and now he had to stay past his working hours to do something he despised doing even more: meeting Derek Thompson.

But Tracy didn't have a choice. He had to get back to work.


End file.
